3D DRAM Could Be Revolutionary - If It Works
Blocks&Files, Friday, May 5,2023
We have become so used to 3D NAND that we forget how revolutionary it was back in 2013. The idea that you could radically increase the density of a NAND wafer by stacking cells instead of just laying them out side by side is now taken for granted.
We have 176-layer 3D NAND in production, 230-layer product coming, and 300-layers in development.
Yet DRAM is stuck fast in the planar era. It is fastened so solidly to 2D production technology that storage-class memories such as Intel's Optane 3D XPoint were developed to provide near-DRAM speed but costs closer to NAND. Optane failed because its costs were kept high by limited production and the complexity of programming its non-volatile memory was too high.